‘With mirthful merriment’: Masquerade and Masculinity in Mágus saga jarls

Summary

Mágus saga jarls (also known as Bragða-Mágus saga) is an innovative saga that draws on a vast array of sources to tell a story that explores the boundaries between reality and fantasy, true and false identities, the performance of gender, the basis of power, and the ideal qualities of leaders. The action moves all over Europe and includes stock features of the late medieval sagas, including some of their most colourful battle descriptions, but wry intertextual references to traditional Norse motifs are also used effectively. That this saga was wildly popular through the ages should come as no surprise: it is a riveting tale involving wronged heroes, tyrannical kings, cross-dressing, shrewd and subversive women, comically evil villains, and the crafty magician Mágus. Beneath its raucous exterior, the saga raises important questions about power, rulership, and ethics, and through its playful engagement with clichéd roles from both native and courtly culture, it presents gender in its different manifestations as performative.

Scholarship on the Icelandic legendary sagas and romances – considered as one genre by some – has taken off recently, illuminating the ways in which Scandinavians interacted with new ideologies and literary conventions that Francophone romances brought to the North. Gender issues have constituted a large part of this discussion: the gender models favoured in these texts were quite at odds with native ones and Old Norse-Icelandic vocabulary for emotion differed considerably from French and Anglo-Norman. Translators adapted their texts for Norse audiences, dispensing with tropes such as the weeping, intensely emotional knight who expresses fear. Instead, the Norse Arthurian knight takes on characteristics of heroic masculinity, displaying courage and assertiveness – qualities which would have been much more palatable to the audience. The courtly model for aristocratic male sexuality, based on chivalry and restraint towards ladies, made more impact on the Icelandic literary scene than the ‘feeble’ Arthurian knight and became dominant in Icelandic romances. This conception of masculinity made its mark on Mágus saga as it did on others, but the saga is unusual in that it engages playfully with the model by having it performed by a cross-dressing woman. The courtly paradigm intersects with ideas about proper rulership and conduct at the monarch's court – no longer a band of warriors but a gathering of knights.